Interview with Gale Anne Hurd

By Brunella Tedesco.

With titles such as The Terminator, Aliens, The Walking Dead and Raising Cain under her belt, Gale Anne Hurd is an indisputable pillar of American cinema. In this edition of the Festival, the producer was awarded a WomanInFan 2025 Honorary Grand Prize for her trajectory.

Congratulations on the WomanInFan Honorary Grand Prize. What would you say has defined your trajectory thus far?

A number of things: passion, persistence, having a certain talent and skill for producing, the ability to work successfully with a team, and always putting the project first.

You began under the mentorship of Roger Corman, and you have also talked a lot about Debra Hill being a close friend and also a mentor. What lessons did you learn from them?

I learned everything from both of them, I don't think there's anything I have improvised myself, but to try to build on the foundation that they gave me. With Roger Corman, he taught me literally every aspect of making a film, from development, the earliest stages to preproduction, production, postproduction, marketing and distribution. You literally couldn't get a better mentorship than that. On the other hand I also learned that sometimes you need to have a larger budget, because he always maxed out at 2 million dollars, which is why The Terminator was not a Roger Corman film, because we took it to him first but he basically said "I'm never gonna be able to give you enough money to make the movie as it should be made". So that was another important lesson.

And from Debra Hill I learned how to hard it was to be a woman in the film industry, as a writer, as a producer... And yet, her tenacity, her passion and her belief are what powered the success of her films, not only the ones she produced with John Carpenter, but so many of her other films people tend to forget. She had remarkable breadth as a producer, and she was always someone who helped others, and fought for everyone on the crew. Debra taught me that filmmaking is teamwork, everyone contributes. There is no one on a film set that you can do without, and you should treat everyone with a level of respect regardless of what their title may be.

Have you tried to exercise that mentoring role yourself?

Yes, I do mentor, and in fact I have an internship program in my company as well. I try to pass along the kind of mentorship I have received from both of them.

Would you say that championing women both on screen and off screen is one of your goals?

It just comes natural to me, it's part of my DNA.

Can you tell me about how The Terminator was developed? It all started from a dream, right?

Jim [James Cameron] was quite ill and he was in postproduction in Rome with Piranha II, and he woke up in the middle of the night and this image was seared in his brain of The Terminator endoskeleton emerging from the flames. And he knew there was a movie there. And he called me up and we started talking about it. From that point there was a year and a half before we had a script. Trying to find financing was impossible; I'm sure there are exceptions but every young filmmaker knows of these difficulties. The first time is always the hardest because you have no track record. What really helped was the fact that through Roger Corman I knew people who worked at Orion Pictures and, although it's a much more complicated story than that, we ended up making the film with them.

You have produced many films and television shows throughout your career, but a lot of them have been horror, sci-fi, fantasy. What attracts you the most about these genres?

It's what I've loved since I was a child. I was an avid reader, especially fantasy and horror, and I've been a fan first and filmmaker second my whole life.

What do you think are the biggest challenges today for producing films and television?

The consolidation of the industry: there are fewer and fewer financiers, distributors, cinemas... And the threat of AI, that AI is going to literally take the place of all of the fantastic people who create the teams in the movies.

And how should we fight back against that?

It has to be legislation. We have to push our politicians, and make sure that they understand that it should be people first, and profit second. And that's very difficult in a capitalist society.